Sometimes I feel like I should be called “TimesPundit” as all I appear to do is respond to articles I read in the Times.
That aside, there’s times when my own personal experience converges with what I read in the Times and today’s article by Libby Purves “Of course the play’s the thing” is a prominent example of this phenomenon.
There seems to be a considerable debate amongst educators about how to ‘deal’ with Shakespeare. Purves does a magnificent job of highlighting and distinguishing the different voices which have been raised about the issue, the Scoffers, Doubters and the Pedants.
For my own part I believe that Shakespeare is not beyond the grasp of any human being. The lessons, emotions and experiences which his work deal with are universally human and easily understandable.
Is Shakespeare too complicated for a teenager? No, not in any way shape or form.
Is Shakespeare too complicated for today’s secondary school student? Quite possibly. Should we therefore remove it from our curriculum? Absolutely Not.
We should instead address the 2 reasons why our secondary schoolchildren are having trouble with understanding the Bard.
Firstly our primary schools are failing children at a phenomenal rate. Primary schools in the Colchester area alone are producing hundreds of pupils who can barely read or write.
In my lifetime I attended 10 (yes, ten) schools and 3 of those were Colchester primary schools. In my first year I was too advanced for my age and was placed in a higher year (the result of the excellent education children receive at ESF schools in Hong Kong), in my next school I actually spent an entire year learning nothing, revisiting math problems I had mastered several years ago and writing at the same level that was expected of me the year before. In fact it was not until I was moved to a private school (and even then only after I was moved to the top set) that I actually went on to be taught anything.
We don’t need to introduce rote learning - children have demonstrated that they respond far better to active play at a young age and that you can still provide games and activities to help them along right the way through to year 6. What we need to do is actually make sure all children come out of their primary school with a standard of reading and writing which befits our linguistic heritage.
I speak honestly when I say that most primary school children in Italy can write better English than primary school leavers in the UK.
My mother’s Engish sets turn in essays which actually include the phrases “In da house” “I fink” and “Wot?”. No longer is this phraseology the sole domain of St Custard’s very own Nigel Molesworth, it is being produced in the exercise books of our youth.
Secondly, we have to stop being so unbelievably stupid as to present the Bard as “hard”, “boring” or “a struggle”. Shakespeare’s plays:
1) Concern universally relevant issues
2) Provide an excellent sandbox for devloping literary analysis skills, and
3) Have an almost endless legion of devotees in the dramatic world who would happily perform or offer insights about them in schools.
Anyone who thinks Shakespeare is “dull” or “boring” is either a moron or hasn’t been taught properly. The vast majority are the latter. Quite apart from the fact that the credentials of an illiterate teenager as a literary critic are rather lacking, there is no room for supposed critical or artistic opinion on the matter, one could no more easily dismiss Michelangelo’s work as “crap”.
It is testament to the shambles that is education today that by their own incompetence or more likely, institutional bungling concerning examination and method, teachers are capable of making the greatest works of literature boring for students.
It’s not just the way we teach Shakespeare that needs to be looked at, it’s the way we teach our children at the very start of their education, which must be thrust under the microscope, lest we find that the creeping malevolence of ignorance and illiteracy is “in da house”.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at September 26, 2006 05:20 PM